It would be hard to spot the difference as students head back to school this week, but Google’s ubiquitous presence in Mountain View has found its way into the classrooms of the Mountain View-Los Altos High School District.
Starting this year, the district’s teachers and students will be automatically signed up for Google Apps for Education (GAFE), giving them a specialized suite of Google apps for turning in and grading assignments, a digital dashboard for managing their classes and a school Gmail account.
The adoption of GAFE came after “very positive feedback” from a 10-teacher pilot of the apps last year, according to a district report.
The grand vision for the new system is for teachers and students to seamlessly transition school assignments into the digital realm, according to Associate Superintendent Mike Mathiesen. Teachers can create an assignment and it gets automatically sent out to students through their Google accounts. Students can complete their assignments online, saving their work along the way, and turn it in with a time stamp.
“Students and staff have to all be in the same digital ecosystem,” Mathiesen said. “That was really the driving force behind diving in with both feet”
When students log into their new school accounts, they are greeted by a dashboard with all of their classes for the year, assignments from teachers and their own drive for storing projects and other classwork.
Google Apps for Education launched in August last year and continues to be picked up by schools and school districts across the country, according to Zach Yeskel, a former Oakland teacher and the product manager for Google Classroom. While he said he couldn’t give away the number of total users, Yeskel said about 70 million assignments have been turned in so far.
While Google Classroom is by no means the first online manager for students to digitally turn in assignments, there are a few new perks to the suite of Google apps. The big difference, Yeskel said, is that all the data is stored in the cloud, so teachers can review and comment on student work in real time.
That means teachers can not only go paperless, but the school’s IT department no longer has to store and manage all that data themselves — a big plus for the district, Mathiesen said.
“When more information and resources are hosted off-site, that frees up our IT staff to focus on other things,” Mathiesen said, noting that the staff has had to manage thousands of new district-owned Chromebooks in recent years.
The adoption of GAFE comes after last year’s announcement that students at Los Altos High School students would be required to bring a laptop or Chromebook to school each day. The district loans Chromebooks to students who cannot afford to buy their own.
Adopting the new system has been a mixed bag so far, Mathiesen told the school board at an Aug. 3 meeting. Some staff have acclimatized to the new system and are familiar with Gmail, which comes with a similar suite of apps, although without the Google Classroom dashboard, while others have headed into totally uncharted territory with GAFE.
To help get everyone up to speed, the district has enlisted the help of their new instructional technology specialist, Joe Johnson, and a support team of four district teachers who can help out. Teachers can ease into the transition at their own pace, Mathiesen said, and there’s no district mandate to use Google Classroom to manage their classes.
“If they don’t use Google Classroom this year, that’s okay,” Mathiesen said.
The tech upgrade also comes with some new privacy implications. The district owns all of the new Google accounts and email addresses, meaning they are subject to searches, Mathiesen said. The acceptable use agreement students sign at the beginning of the year has been updated with language reminding students that any content on the drive can be accessed by district staff, and to be mindful of what they put on there.
Mathiesen compared the new Google accounts to a “technology locker” which could be checked when staff needs to search a particular student, and said the change could be seen as a healthy step for students to start establishing a separate set of emails for professional and personal use.
“We look at it from an educational standpoint, preparing students to maintain in their adult lives a professional presence and that personal presence,” Mathiesen said.
New locker rooms and new teachers
Outside of cyberspace, the school district also went to work over the summer constructing $2 million upgrades to the locker rooms at Mountain View High School, gutting and renovating the inside of the facilities. The library has also been reconfigured and outfitted with movable bookshelves and areas with half-wall partitions for students to have more flexibility to work alone or in groups.
The district also went on a small hiring spree over the summer, bringing in approximately 25 new teachers as of late last month, according to Associate Superintendent Eric Goddard. While the teacher shortage has been pervasive across the state and is affecting plenty of Bay Area school districts, Goddard said MVLA had no trouble attracting talented applicants this year.
This year also marks the first year with the new superintendent Jeff Harding at the helm. Former Superintendent Barry Groves retired on June 30 after leading the school district for the past nine years.
Email Kevin Forestieri at kforestieri@mv-voice.com
